Is beauty a virtue?

Posted: 20 Jun 2011  |  By: Patricia Anderson - Editor

Aesthetics? Like a troublemaker in the classroom, ‘aesthetics’ was the naughty word that was told to go and stand in the corner in the 1970s and, to this editor’s mind, no-one in the contemporary art world has given it permission to come out and sit down at its desk yet.

Unless art carried some cultural or political message in that decade and beyond, it ran the risk of being branded irrelevant, or worse, merely decorative.
With art hijacked for causes, both worthy and transiently fashionable, another casualty was skill. Techniques that were thought to underpin art practice, such as drawing, became for a while dismissed and even derided. Another debate which divided both practitioners and observers was the artificial and meaningless distinction between ‘art’ and ‘craft’.

Where does the word ‘art’ come from? It certainly wasn’t used in antiquity to describe the objects and sculptures used to adorn places of worship, civic buildings or luxury villas. It comes from a Latin word ‘ars’ or ‘artem’ which meant ‘craft’ or ‘skill’, and its meaning as an application of skill in the creative arts with respect to painting only makes its appearance in the early 1600s. It seems remarkable now that until the end of the Mediaeval period, painting was not considered to be among the fine arts, but merely the work of competent artisans, and painters during the Renaissance sought to have their works accorded the prestige and esteem which had belonged only to sculpture until that time.

The rise of an institution which created a structure for ascertaining ‘quality’ in art — the Royal Academy in London founded in 1768 — started its life as an artists’ trade union. Its first president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, a celebrated artist but also an embryonic critic who wrote Discourses on Painting, promoted the idea that painters should be paid in guineas rather than pounds, befitting their status as professionals. Today, photography, glass and ceramics have also gained admittance to the fine art club while one of the most fertile arenas — contemporary jewellery — still seeks a higher profile and a larger collector base.

To return, and mercifully briefly, to the lingering art/craft divide, one clarification is proposed here: ‘craft’ could be considered the skill of the maker, and the designation ‘art’ applied if it creates an aesthetic surprise, embodies the singular vision of the maker — that is, it is original — and if its qualities prompt us to see the world at a slightly different tilt. A message is not mandatory.
There is a tidal wave of ‘art’ making its appearance today, intended to dazzle with a display of technical virtuosity, but no amount of excellent workmanship can make up for work which is formulaic, derivative, copycat or clichéd.

Those commentators and critics who are occasionally designated to comment on the authenticity of an artist’s vision do so because they are thought to have good visual judgement — a ‘good eye’. What does a good eye mean? One might regard it as a particular kind of fine tuning, not unlike having ‘perfect pitch’ in the musical sense. The notion of possessing a ‘good eye’ was once bandied around the art world quite a bit, and perhaps it should be again. It means the ability — and the willingness — to make judgements about aesthetic excellence; to make distinctions between the remarkable, the passable, the mediocre and the outright failure. People who claim to have a ‘good eye’ are often called elitists, although it is a surprisingly democratic phenomenon. It can’t be learnt — although it can be honed, no fancy degrees will confer it, and no amount of bluffing can conceal its absence. While some art historians and critics with a more sociopolitical leaning in their assessment of artworks would deny such a thing existed, it does.

And now to the first of our new bimonthly issues. aAR has a particular focus on areas of art and design practice other than painting. This focus is a reminder that some of the most exploratory, fertile and visually pleasing works being made in Australia today are just as likely to appear as furniture, ceramics, glass, jewellery, printmaking and fibre.